is Hamlet. Indeed, this is universally acknowledged to be the supreme product of dramatic genius in modern times, the only possible rival to it being the Faust of Goethe.

Yet it cannot be contended that Hamlet is, from every point of view, the best of our author's works. It has not the movement and the pace of Macbeth ; it is not, like Julius Cæsar or The Tempest, a work without a flaw, without a word too much or a word too little "one entire and perfect chrysolite ”—it lacks the delicate and haunting charm of The Merchant of Venice. The play within the play, performed before the King and Queen, at Hamlet's instigation, in order to probe the conscience of these evildoers, is on a theme which no company of actors would have dared to represent before the court in the circumstances, and is, therefore, altogether unnatural and out of place. There are other improbabilities and incongruities, which mar the artistic effect; and the interest falls off towards the end, the last two acts being nothing like so fine as the first three.

Still, in spite of these defects, this drama holds the foremost place. If it does not do so by its perfection as a whole, it effects it by the vast numbers of good things it contains. It has nearly all the minor sources of interest already noted in the other tragedies. For instance, it begins well, the apparition of the ghost of the murdered king putting curiosity and attention

on the stretch. The minor characters are decidedly interesting. There is Horatio, the friend of Hamlet, who draws forth from the hero this matchless description of friendship:

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath sealed thee for herself; for thou hast been
As one in suffering all that suffers nothing;

A man that fortune's buffets and rewards

Hast ta'en with equal thanks; and blessed are those Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled, That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger

To sound what stop she please.

Give me that man

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him

In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.

There is Ophelia, whose treatment at the hands of the hero is one of the puzzles of this play on which the commentators have expended a world of speculation without doing much to clear up the mystery, but who, in her fondness, her sufferings and her fate, is one of the most unique and pathetic of Shakspeare's female characters. And there is her father Polonius, perhaps the most effectively painted of all the minor figures in Shakspeare's vast gallery of portraits-the type of the courtier and councillor, with unbounded confidence in the virtue of his own advice, with maxims

and proverbs ready for every occasion, and with a formality and tediousness sufficient to drive any poor child of nature mad that comes within range of his longwinded eloquence. There is a strong dash of comedy in the portraiture of this worthy; and the comic element is supplied in this play in considerable quantity. It is, however, of grim and sardonic quality, the principal scene of this kind being in the churchyard, when the gravediggers, engaged in making the last resting place for Ophelia, exchange grim pleasantries, as they perform their ghastly function.

But in Hamlet, more than in any of the other Tragedies, the interest is concentrated on the heroon his character, his relations with the other figures of the play, and the catastrophe in which he is ultimately involved. His speeches, of which he is very liberal, are the finest things of the kind in existence; and the opportunities of declamation which they afford to actors doubtless account, to some extent, for the popularity of this play. His advice to the players, for example, seems expressly written for the purpose of giving an elocutionist a chance; but, as Shakspeare's own calling was that of an actor, it has also an unrivalled autobiographical interest :-" Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But, if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the towncrier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand

thus, but use all gently; for, in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters-to very rags-to split the ears of the groundlings I would have such a fellow whipped.

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you overstep not the modesty of nature. Oh, there be players that I have seen play -and heard others praise, and that highly-not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably."

Hamlet is a young prince, with all the advantages the world can offer

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

The observed of all observers

yet he is completely out of temper with the world. And this is always a popular figure; for, as we like

to weep artistic tears, however much we may deprecate real ones, so the most fashionable and conventional people enjoy hearing conventionality belaboured, as Hamlet attacks it :

O God, O God,

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.

"I have of late lost all my mirth; and it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air-this brave o'erhanging firmament—this majestical roof fretted with golden fire-appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither." So far gone is he in this world-weariness that he has had thoughts of getting rid of the burden of life by his own act, and some of his most eloquent speeches are on the subject of suicide; as, for example, the one, too well known to be quoted, beginning, "To be, or not to be, that is the question". Such thoughts, too, are always popular, as was proved by the sensation produced throughout Europe by The Sorrows of Werther. Even those who have not the slightest desire really to get quit of life like to trifle with the edge of the razor, and they feel a kind of tragic exaltation in so doing.